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Ecomedia
How the Natural World is Transforming the Nature of Media.
This weblog is not the usual blog of daily events. It contains a series of notes/thoughts designed to make connections between science and media art.
Sometimes these ideas are tied in with current events, but most of the time this blog is not in any particular order. It serves as a central area for a detailed examination of ideas first published in a 1999 Leonardo Journal article entitled 'Active Vision' that I hope to develop into a book that will discuss some of the current developments in science, ecology, media and society and how they inform and are informed by new technologies. The book will be written for artists working with digital media and anyone who is interested in future directions of the medium.
http://www.andreapolli.com
last modified Sep 7, 2006 at 13:00
When we first arrived in Sydney for a week-long conference about a month ago, I was struck by the intensity of the sunlight. Even in what was Australia's winter, the sunlight was barely tolerable without strong sunglasses. I wasn't sure why I was having such a dramatic physical response to the light, but then I learned that ozone depletion was starting to become a serious problem in area of Australia. Realizing that the body is able to recognize dangerous levels of light energy, I started to think about how our ability to measure light is augmented by technology.
One of the variables often measured by satellite imaging is solar irradiance (sunlight intensity). This information is an important part of weather and climate prediction and is now being used for solar resources assessment. That is, to research how to more effectively gather and use solar energy. Under the Energy, Environment, and Sustainable Development program of the European Commission, the HELIOSAT-3 satellite will supply not only low-resolution solar radiation data as is currently gathered remotely, but angular and spectral distribution. The goal of this technology is to determine from the height of a satellite, the lighting conditions for those of us on the surface.
While in Sydney, we stayed at a resprt hotel in an area called Manly beach. Manly is a surfer's paradise and although it was a little chilly, the beach outside our hotel was always filled with wet-suited surfers catching the waves. Wind energy over water is greater and more consistent than that over land, so internationally many more windfarms are positioned in the ocean. Wind speeds are usually measured by ground-based weather stations, however, and the difficulty of placing these stations over water has made the measurement of ocean winds more difficult.
On Manly beach, the surfers seemed entirely intuned to the wind energy on the water. The ritual seemed to be: arrive, suit up, and stand looking at the water for 10 minutes or more before heading in. This visual assessment allowed the surfers to get an idea of whether or not a rough ride awaited them. Can the assessment of waves also be used to determine win energy potential? Recent technology called scatterometry uses reflected microwaves to measure sea surface roughness as an indirect way to determine wind speed and direction. This active technology improves on the visual system of the surfer by not only gathering information for a large area remotely through satellite, but it does not depend on sunlight so can gather information any time of day or night and in any kind of weather conditions.
Sen, Avery. 'Remote Sensing Applied to Developing Renewable Energy' _Imaging Notes_ Summer, 2004 Vol. 19 No. 3
(a combination of some previous posts and new material)
In 2004, Mark Bain, an artist who creates sound installations by attaching oscillators to buildings and other architectural structures, created an audio CD using seismological data recorded by Columbia University in New York the morning of September 11th, 2001. His 74-minute work time-stretches the ground vibrations caused by the World Trade Center towers at the moments of impact with the two commercial airliners and the buildings' subsequent collapse. Writer Mark Oliver of the Guardian describes this work as 'The Day the Earth Screamed.'
The seismological data stream used by Bain was not, of course, specifically recorded for the purpose of documenting the attack. Columbia University was just doing what it does every hour of every day, listening for possible earthquakes and recording data for review and analysis. This massive data collection project made no distinction between an ordinary day and September 11th, a day that started out ordinary but turned out to be one of the most significant days in recent history. To the computers recording the data, there was no particular aspect of that tiny piece of the larger seismological database that made it any more or less significant than any other stream of data, the meaning of this particular data stream came from the artist's and the audience's connection to and interpretation of the information.
According to Brett Stalbaum in an article called 'Database Logic and Landscape Art' (available at http://www.c5corp.com), one of the most important roles of a database artist is to project meaning onto meaningless data streams. In the article, he challenges artists not to be "bound to work through semantic models in a way dictated by the purposes for which the data is collected, such as 'economic, rainfall, and surveillance.'" Instead, artists should work to find other meanings, those that might transcend the day to day and as Mitchell Whitelaw states, 'evoke the sublime.'
However, my interest as an artist is in how this transcendence can have an effect on our day to day reality. Herbert Marcuse's thesis in his 1977 work, 'The Aesthetic Dimension' is that "the radical qualities of art, that is to say, its indictment of the established reality and its invocation of the beautiful image of liberation are grounded precisely in the dimensions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from the given universe of discourse and behavior while preserving its overwhelming presence." Marcuse talks about how under the law of aesthetic form, reality is necessarily sublimated, content stylized, and "the 'data' are reshaped and reordered in accordance with the demands of the art form, which requires that even the representation of death and destruction invoke the need for hope- a need rooted in the new consciousness embodied in the work of art." Of course he's not talking about the same kind of 'data' we're discussing here, he's talking about the raw material of experience, but to the database artist the database is part of that landscape of raw material, what Whitelaw calls 'pure (found) object'.
Many of Marcuse's theories of aesthetics seem to follow the ideas put forward by a group of artists who called themselves the Situationist International founded by Guy Debord in 1957. One of the primary aesthetic goals of the Situationist movement was negation. In defining the function of negation, Debord states in 'The Situationists and New Forms of Action in Politics and Art' that "insight into this reversible coherence of the world - its present reality in relation to its potential reality- enables one to see the fallaciousness of half-measures and the recognize the presence of such half-measures each time the operating pattern of the dominant society- with its categories of heirarchization and specialization and its corresponding habits and tastes- reconstitutes itself within the forces of negation." In other words, if traditional ways in which to interpret information: the spreadsheet, visual graph, text document, etc. are the 'dominant' forces, in the manner of the Situationists, data-benders negate this dominance through brute-force, and therefore negate meaning in order to rebuild it.
Are data-bending and data sonification aesthetic transformations? Aesthetic transformation according to Marcuse, "is achieved through a reshaping of language, perception, and understanding...The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality, to define what is real." His aesthetic form "gives the familiar content and the familiar experience the power of estrangement- and which leads to the emergence of a new consciousness and a new perception." Bain's work in transforming seismological data is an aesthetic transformation in that it changes the listener's perception and defines a new reality. What might have been perceived as an isolated event is transformed into one during which the earth itself reacts with a scream as if it was a living being experiencing pain and this leaves a deep impression on the listener whose previous impulse, one that might have been for retribution, is transformed into an impulse to heal.
How, then, is transforming data sets different from transforming the raw material of the real world? Like a photograph, a data set is a representation, but unlike a photograph, this representation can be entered, explored, and transformed. A data set can be experienced, but unlike a real-world experience, it can be replayed from various points of view and under different conditions. The weather and climate models I have been working with are designed to respond to various conditions. Simulations are tested against the real world and the results either confirm the accuracy of the model or force the scientists to reconsider and re-design. When a simulation is run, it is often run using several different models and the results are compared. If the results of these simulations generally agree, for example if several different climate models show that maintaining the current level of greenhouse gas emissions will result in significant global warming, the prediction is deemed accurate.
Stalbaum talks about the prevalence of simulations and how in many cases the simulation precedes and may even cause events in actual reality. The example Stalbaum uses to illustrate this phenomenon is the stock market, but another example might be the polling process. Referring back to Marcuse, these simulations "break the monopoly of established reality, to define what is real."
Therefore an active engagement with data models and databases is an important aspect of working in this medium. Stalbaum, in writing specifically about GIS databases, sees the database not as a static subject on which an artist projects meaning, or even as a malleable piece of 'clay' transformed by an artist, but as a "catalyzing factor in the conversation." He optimistically states that "data and control systems provide a channel through which ecosystems are able to express an influence in favor of their own protection." But in order for the expression of the data to be heard, we have to be listening.
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